My boy asked me, who is the parent of the big bang? I replied to my son that, nobody knows. After few hours, I realized, is it true that no body knows? or is it true that somebody knows, but we don’t know who that is?
After few more hours, I realized, I almost encountered this kind of question at work every day in last few months. I’m responsible to implement few enterprise projects at work and due to laser focus to implement those projects, for the first time, I found no time to blog in last few months since I started blogging. For some of those enterprise projects, I have been having status call every day for last few months. In those calls, I had various stakeholders including my team, existing hosting provider, new hosting provider, technology provider, solution provider and etc. In those conference calls, we discussed about few technical problems, issues, challenges and at few instance, we discussed few items which were show stopper to the project.
The same questions occurred to me in those calls, is it true that no body in the call does not know the solution? Or is it true that some body knows the solution but I don’t know who that is? When there were twenty technical experts on the conference call, and there was no solution for a technical problem then I started asking the following question:
- Are we asking the right questions?
- Do we have the right person?
- Are we asking the right question to the right person?
I asked these questions to myself and changed the direction of conversation in the conference call and there was an instance where I was told that there was zero probability to solve a technical problem in next 10-15 business days which was a show stopper of the project but the problem was fully solved, validated and verified before end of the one hour conference call.
Bottom line is, are we asking the right questions?
I would be iserenttd in knowing what metrics can be used to track the success of an enterprise archiect; are there performance measures that can be directly attributed to the role of an architect and that in turn to the success of the IT function.